Uneven Odds - another milestone

Rcap:

The player has two actions, playing cards and re-dealing cards. Performing actions costs varying amounts of energy, some of which is recovered at the beginning of a new turn. The enemy's turn occurs if and only if the player's energy is depleted. There is a type of a card in the game which is harmful to the player if it's not combo'ed (combing is the act of having cards of the same type next to each other).

New Changes from palytesting

Difficulty and Restrictive gameplay

Following another iteration of playtesting. The players still found the stages of combat to be restrictive in terms of being able to play as many cards as they want to play. And that plus having to save for stamina ahead of time, as well as sometimes not being able to use the combos they have set up, due to the needed use of stamina, made the game challenging in a bad way. It was 'hindering' the player's ability to perform rather than creating a real obstacle where the player had to 'perform' better, and though the two concepts are similar in giving the game added difficulty, it is interpreted differently by the player.

Solution with new mechanic

Following on this, an idea came up with merging both of the stages to be one, where the player can expend their stamina on either re-dealing or playing the cards, and their turn simply ends on them depleting their stamina., since playing a card effectively also re-deals now (as when a card is played, the player's hand is dealt back up to a full hand, immediately),

furthermore, two modes are implemented, one where the turn will automatically end if the player cannot make any more actions and there are no more poxies on board (poxies are cards that could harm the player). Alternatively, the easier mode is that the player can end the turn anytime with a lever they can interact with, this gives the player the advantage of not having to play the poxy cards which could damage them, and build better combos across turns and save up cards (in not being forced to play out all the poxies before turnover, the player could save the poxies and they will eventually combo, getting rid of its negative effect). Though it still pertains the fact that, in not using up all their given energy within a certain round and saving up cards for the next round, their total number of actions will reduce, and this is likely to hinder their total output. As such the player is expected in a psychological stand point to at first attempt to utilize all their energy each round and play as many cards as possible, only to slowly learn overtime that sometimes playing less cards but bigger combos can have overweigning efficacy in comparison to playing cards nonstop until the depletion of their energy.